Quality Links and How to Measure Your Link Profile

Links from other websites are still one of the signals Google uses to judge how relevant pages are. My recommendation is to spend your time on content and relationships that make others want to refer to you. Then measure your link profile regularly so that you can see which way it is moving.

Google says in its guidelines on links that links are used as a signal to judge relevance and to find new pages. At the same time, Google counts links created mainly to influence rankings as link spam.

A website that breaks the spam policies may rank lower or disappear from the search results altogether. The number of links therefore says little about how strong a profile is.

What makes a link valuable

A good link can be recognised by three things.

• It comes from a website that your customers read and trust.
• It sits in a text about the same subject as the page it points to.
• It is there because someone thought your page was worth referring to.

Anchor text is the clickable words in a link. Google describes good anchor text as descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to both the page the link is on and the page it leads to.

A link like that also gives you something you can see without any tools. It sends visitors who are already interested in what you do.

How to earn links that last

Links that last almost always come from having something others need to refer to.

These are the routes I find give the most.

• Content others want to refer to. A guide, a checklist or a page that explains something in your industry more clearly than others becomes a natural source for people who write about the subject.
• Data and surveys. Your own statistics, a customer survey or figures from your business give journalists and trade media something to quote.
• Mentions without a link. Look up articles and lists where your name already appears without a link. A friendly email suggesting the right page is sometimes enough to get one.
• Partners, suppliers and customers. Reference lists, partner pages and joint case studies give links that reflect real collaborations.
• Industry bodies and associations. Memberships and certifications with organisations your industry trusts often give relevant links from trusted websites.
• PR and expert comment. If you comment on your industry in the media or speak at events, you can earn links from websites that are otherwise hard to reach.

The collaborations need to be real. Google counts excessive link exchanges and partner pages that exist only to link to each other as link spam. The same goes for links created with automated programs.

How we measure a link profile

Do you know which websites link to you today? We use Majestic to find out. The tool maps links across the web and puts its own metrics on them.

These are the metrics I look at most when I assess a link profile.

Metric	What it shows	What to look for
Referring domains	The number of different websites that link to you	Relevant websites that your customers read
Trust Flow	How closely your website is linked to websites Majestic has hand-picked as trustworthy	A score that is not far below Citation Flow
Citation Flow	The volume of links, whether they are good or bad	The gap to Trust Flow
Topical Trust Flow	The subjects in which the website has influence	Your own industry at the top
Anchor text	The words used in the links to you	Mostly your company name and web address but few exact keywords
Growth over time	How many links are found and lost	Steady growth from relevant websites

Referring domains

The number of referring domains says more than the total number of links because a single website can give hundreds of links from a footer. My assessment is that ten relevant trade publications carry more weight than a hundred websites nobody reads.

Trust Flow and Citation Flow

Majestic calls the two metrics Flow Metrics. Both run from 0 to 100. Trust Flow stands for quality and Citation Flow for quantity.

According to Majestic, the gap between the two can be a signal in its own right. If Trust Flow is far below Citation Flow, the website has many links but few from trusted sources. Then I go through which links they are.

A slightly lower Trust Flow is normal. According to Majestic, it is very rare for a website to have a higher Trust Flow than Citation Flow. Majestic also advises against relying on a single metric.

Topical Trust Flow

Majestic divides the web into more than 800 subject categories. For a construction company, I want to see construction and property at the top. If the strongest links come from entirely different subjects, the relevance is weak even if the numbers look good.

Anchor text

Many links with exactly the same keyword as anchor text are a warning sign because few people write like that of their own accord. Google's examples of link spam include keyword-rich links in widgets and forum comments with optimised links.

Growth over time

A sudden spike from websites with no connection to your industry is worth looking into. The same goes for when an important link disappears.

Patterns that do not hold up

Google lists several kinds of link spam in its spam policies. The examples include these.

• Links from low-quality directories.
• Links in footers or templates that are spread across many websites.
• Low-value content that exists mainly to generate links.

If you find links like these to your website, you usually do not need to do anything. Google says in the help for its disavow links tool that in most cases it can work out by itself which links to trust. If the tool is used incorrectly, it can harm your visibility in the search results.

My recommendation is to disavow links only when Google has issued a manual action or when there are many unnatural links that are likely to lead to one. In all other cases, your time is better spent on new and good links.

Links and visibility in AI search

Links matter even when customers ask an AI. Google says that the same SEO fundamentals apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode and that there are no special requirements to appear there. A page needs to be indexed and eligible to be shown with a snippet in Google to be linked as a source.

My assessment is that the same logic applies to ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude when they search the web. They cite sources that others refer to.

A company that is mentioned in trade media, in comparisons and in the news has more sources pointing in the same direction. Mentions without a link probably count there too because the AI services read the text itself.

When we measure visibility in AI search, we also see which websites the answers refer to. That list is a good starting point for which links and mentions are worth working for.

How we work with SEO is described on our services page.